1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data record manipulation.
2. Related Art
Data mining and data visualization tools are called upon to handle ever increasing amounts of data. Databases or flat files can contain large data sets of records. The data records have different fields representing different data attributes or variables. In this way, the records can represent multivariate data sets. Depending upon the type of data involved, a data visualization is displayed to identify data content, characteristics, properties, relationships, trends, and any other aspect of the data. Many types of data visualizations are possible, such as, a scatter plot, geographical or map visualization, and a tree or hierarchy visualization.
Histograms are often used to summarize data records and attributes. A data record transformation unit is used to transform records into corresponding histograms. If data records are transformed into histogram format before performing aggregations on the data, the resulting calculation is costly and inefficient. Processing all records for a large gigabyte data set is slow and expensive.